Bottas confident of large points haul in Canada

Valtteri Bottas believes Williams can secure a big haul of points in Canada after seeing its performance in Friday's practice.

Williams was around 0.7s off Lewis Hamilton's one-lap pace in FP2 and appeared to have strong pace in its longer runs on the prime tyre. Felipe Massa and Bottas finished the second session sixth and seventh respectively, which the latter feels demonstrates the fact Williams has made progress since Monaco.

"It's more or less what we expected," Bottas said. "In the end it is a practice so we don't know what others are doing and we are in qualifying mode. But overall, quite a positive day. We got some good results from the changes we made from the last race, so it's nice to see some progress.

"We know that behind Mercedes there are a couple of teams that are really close and we are in that group. Every single little improvement we can make for [Saturday] is going to be important.

"Still, it wasn't easy to warm up the soft tyre but we didn't seem to be the only team. No-one really did their best lap in the first or second lap, it was always getting better and better as you heat up the tyres. Overall, not a bad day."

Despite seeing Ferrari show signs of improvement ahead, Bottas is sure Williams will be in the hunt for a spot at the front end of the grid on Saturday.

"I need to see a little bit more [of] what kind of lap times everybody did but comparing to cars around it seemed ok. Especially at the end when we put on the soft tyre, the pace of those seems to be quite good compared to McLaren or Mercedes. Still we are as hopeful as we were coming into this weekend so I think there's a really good chance for good points here."